Czech Environment Ministry hackathon has three winners, who tackled siting wind and solar power plants

Teams that won a competition in Prague today to develop innovative solutions for siting solar and wind power plants focused on data, communication and simplifying legislation. The hackathon, titled Where should renewables go?, was organised by the Ministry of the Environment. The ministry will use the winning teams’ proposals in its further work on so-called go-to zones.

Go-to or acceleration zones are areas where the state will enable faster construction of renewable energy sources. Hackathon participants focused not only on finding suitable sites, but also on communication and speeding up the building permit process. The event was not a conventional hackathon, in which participants code through the night; rather, it was an ideas sprint. The outcome was therefore not apps, but proposals for new solutions to the challenges of building renewable energy sources.

„One of the winners is a team that created a data resource. It worked with the analytical layers available and defined acceleration zones across the Czech Republic in two variants for wind energy and two variants for solar energy,“ said Eva Volfová, deputy environment minister.